Climate Change as Class War

In this groundbreaking analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted with its disproportionate effect on the climate. Yet, at present the climate movement is unpopular and rooted in the professional class, where it remains incapable of meeting this dizzying challenge. As an alternative, Huber proposes a climate politics to appeal to the majority—the working class—and he evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working-class material and ecological interests. He advocates building union power in the very energy system that must be transformed. In the end, winning the climate struggle will require an internationalist approach based on planetary working-class solidarity.

“Huber has written a ‘What Is To Be Done?’ for all of us who are vexed by the failure of progressive climate activism to produce a blueprint for a national action with clear strategic goals. In a blazing critique, he skewers ‘radical’ as well as liberal environmentalists who advocate market solutions to a crisis whose very cause is the cost-and-profit logic of energy markets. Equally he shows that the electoral road to a Green New Deal is a dead-end without a massive public struggle, integrally involving labor, for public ownership of the power industry. The shelves groan with books on the coming apocalypse , but here, at long last, is a concrete strategy for socialists.”—Mike Davis, co-author of No One Is Illegal